Blogger Peter Quinones (Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse, “a blog about cinema and literature with a concentration on Bellow, DeLillo, Updike and Cavell but frequently branching out into so much more”) just posted “Tracking John Updike’s Foot Fetish – Part 1,” which includes six quotes from six of Updike’s publications as evidence and an admission that “this is only scratching the surface.” Here’s the link.
THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY
Celebrating one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century
Interesting to note the six quotes, but Quinones misses the most compelling quotation of all, from Updike’s 1985 story, ‘The Other Woman’:
‘Only once, that sunny fall they shared, was he physically stirred by her; after three sets she complained of a blister, and on the bench by the side of the court took off her sneaker and sock. Little Foot. The neatness that through the rest of her body seemed rather wooden and mechanical here in her bare, pale foot was exquisite; here in the long low late-afternoon rays that slanted upon them, imprinting their sweaty bodies and tennis outfits with the fencing’s shadowy lozenges, Pat’s sharp small anklebones and metatarsal tendons and untainted toenails roused in Ed a desire to kneel in slobbering self-a basement and to kiss this tidy white piece of woman, to whose golden sole adhered a few cinnamon-red grains of clay-court topping.’
Too witty and knowingly mischievous for any earnest foot-fetishist surely, but a marvelous paragraph revealing Updike at his best.
The Commenters really makes a case; even the great Sherlock Holmes would conclude that there was something “afoot”!